Mixing Rock: Getting a Great Vocal Sound

Now, quite often, I’ll do loads and loads of processing to it, especially when I’m doing a big pop track, but this? I’m hitting the console — this little summing console down here — pretty hard. It’s doing a lot of work for us. So I’m using Decapitator to shape my vocal sound.

[vocals play]

I’m brightening from here. Then I’m smashing it with an 1176.

[vocals continue playing]

Really dynamic. Now put it back on.

[vocal playback]

Back on.

So it’s pretty aggressive. I mean, it’s kind of a quick, be honest, a quick lazy way of mixing the vocal.

But as I said, this song came about with being written and recorded as we were going. You know, I was adding guitars, adding a keyboard part, putting the drums down. All starting essentially from a loop.

So there’s some fun stuff going on, but essentially, not a lot going on in the vocal. I’m going through a stereo channel here, because there’s a whole bunch of gang vocals about to come in on the chorus. The vocal is doing very, very — I’m doing very little to the vocal. Just a Decapitator, and I’m slamming the heck out of it with an 1176 plug-in.

So I’m letting the Cadac do a lot of work, because I’m hitting it super hard. It’s got transformers in it. This is one of those instances where the “summing mixer” is doing a lot of work that I find pleasing.

Now, there’s a lot of summing — hi-fi summing mixers out there. I’m not a fan of them, I’ll be honest. I feel like if I’m going to sum, I want it to be colored. I want it to add distortion, I want it to add transformers, I want a lot of wrongness going on.

Otherwise, I’m just going to mix in-the-box, and I’m going to use some really cool plug-ins. Andrew Schoeps mixes in the box, and he has some really cool transformer based and tape saturation plug-ins. You can just use those, and to be honest, they’re more controllable, I can do more subtlety with it than just buying a $3,000 generic summing mixer.

That to me does not seem like a good use of my money. But if I am going to do something like I am here, where I’m taking a “pop song,” and my version of this pop song is to dirty it up and make it more like a Rock n’ Roll band playing it, that’s why I like using the Cadac.

Now, each to their own, but that works for me, and that’s the reason why I’m using it.

So you’ll find that this vocal is doing — you know, I’m not doing much to it. It’s just really hitting the console.

It’s a pretty tasty plug-in when you’re doing things like this. You’ve got a lot of vocals, because this is me, my old engineer, and the singer going into a room — like you can see, it says W and Phil and Gang, the three of us. We’re singing harmonies and everything.

[vocal playback]

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Pretty remarkable what it’s doing. So let’s just listen down and you’ll see all of the parts. There’s a lot.

Now, you could bounce this to a stereo. You don’t have to do it all separately.

[vocals]

So that’s the lead singer doing a harmony. A third and fifth.

[vocal harmonies]

That’s three of us together.

So that’s the main vocal. Just a gang vocal, three of us.

[gang vocal plays]

Now highs.

[high vocals play]

Sounds like emo music.

[low vocals play]

So these are the low gang vocals.

[high vocals play]

This is all of us just doing it.

So that’s most of the vocals. Put them all together…

Then we’re adding Chris’ plug-in.

[gang vocals play with effects]

The pitch is the same. It hasn’t been turned on. The delay effect is on.

[gang vocal playback]

So what we’ve done is we’ve got a little bit of bass boost, a lot of treble boost, some compression spank.

[gang vocals play]

Take that off, it makes a huge difference.

Treble off. Dark.

With no bottom end.

This is a nifty plug-in. It’s particularly useful on background vocals. I’ve got to be honest, it’s — especially when it comes to gang vocals, because what I’m doing here is I’ve got a lot of vocals, and they’re all going to this stereo plug-in.

We’ve got this from Chris, it sounds fantastic. I really like it. Shout out for making something quick and easy that does the job, but I particularly like it on gang vocals.

I wouldn’t necessarily use it on a pair of BVs. You’ve seen me use other things, but on a gang vocal, it’s a quick and easy fix. It does wonderful things, because it does quick EQ where it’s taking mids and highs, and he’s making very, very generic kind of ideas that work.